Growth in color management has resulted in an increase in software packages that are used to generate International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles. ICC profiles describe color attributes of a particular device or viewing requirement by defining a mapping between a source or target color space and a Profile Connection Space (PCS), such as either CIELAB (L*a*b*) or CIEXYZ.
A fundamental design of an ICC-based color managed workflow is the use of the PCS as an independent space between all devices, which has an advantage of requiring the characterization of the relationship between only the device and the PCS. A connection to any other device may then be made through the PCS.
However, if another device does not use an ICC-based color managed workflow (e.g., red, green blue (RGB) to cyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK) conversion), matching the color transformations of this device becomes much more difficult, especially if the device is using formulas independent of the characteristics of the device such as paper type, toner color, or ink density.
These non-color managed workflows often have no configurability and may differ from one printer or print server to the next. Moreover, a system that performs color management has no ability to implement a device dependent formula based workflow.
As a result, a mechanism for implementing a formula based workflow in a color management workflow is desired.